THE YELLOW RIVER - Seán McSweeney & Gerard Smyth
The Yellow River is a tributary of the Blackwater (Kells), which joins the Boyne at Navan, County Meath that unites the personal histories of poet Gerard Smyth and artist Sean McSweeney. Gerard Smyth spent many summers in Meath staying with his grandmother and an aunt, whilst originally Sen McSweeney’s family lived in Clongill until the untimely death of his father. Over two years Gerard Smyth revisited Meath in further inquiry with Belinda Quirke, Director of Solstice, in the development of a new suite of poems, recollecting and revisiting significant sites of occurrence in the poet’s and county’s history. Sean McSweeney created new work from trips to his original home place and the county. McSweeney here responds lyrically to particular sites of Smyth’s poetry, whilst also depicting in watercolour, ink, tempera and drawing, the particular hues of The Royal County.
The Yellow River is a tributary of the Blackwater (Kells), which joins the Boyne at Navan, County Meath that unites the personal histories of poet Gerard Smyth and artist Sean McSweeney. Gerard Smyth spent many summers in Meath staying with his grandmother and an aunt, whilst originally Sen McSweeney’s family lived in Clongill until the untimely death of his father. Over two years Gerard Smyth revisited Meath in further inquiry with Belinda Quirke, Director of Solstice, in the development of a new suite of poems, recollecting and revisiting significant sites of occurrence in the poet’s and county’s history. Sean McSweeney created new work from trips to his original home place and the county. McSweeney here responds lyrically to particular sites of Smyth’s poetry, whilst also depicting in watercolour, ink, tempera and drawing, the particular hues of The Royal County.
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TRICKS OF THE NIGHT, 1965
In the late twilights
when summer was half-dark at ten o’clock
you had to run home from a neighbour’s house,
down a country lane
where the hedgerows had eyes –
a trick of the night
and bats in flight were catching up
on time they lost in the daylight hours.
You ran with speed,
glimpsing things not there,
imagining that the phantom shape in the field
was something other than the obsolete plough
snared in a tangle of ivy and bramble,
forgotten since the time of the horse.
The figure passing by on the high saddle
of a bicycle, was that the bogeyman
or banshee, a scarf tied under her chin,
on her way to spook a countrywoman in Clongill?
And when the scar-faced moon appeared,
half-in, half-out of the clouds
it changed the whole perspective,
blanched the high summer hedges.
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